The Award 486 BIOS detects my 8GB drive as a 2GB one, but still boots into it, with no errors, no missing or garbled directories/files... The games run fine, everything seems to work fine just now, but how likely is it that the BIOS will cause some problems down the line? I've no interest in installing Win9x (or any non-game, SeRiOuS programs) and my collection has practically no 3D accellerated games, so (for the sake of not cooking my potato laptop) I would really like to avoid running on a Pentium-level BIOS/CPU.
Obviously, I would keep a backup of the VHD on an external drive, but still... I'd like to know how much of a hassle I'm setting myself up for.
Award 486 vs 8GB VHD with DOS 7.1
Re: Award 486 vs 8GB VHD with DOS 7.1
If you want to play safe. Just start with a single 2 GB drive and add another one as a second drive when needed. You can also add a second emPC when needed. So there isn't a limitation in practice.
Another thing you could try is using SCSI instead of IDE. SCSI adapters use their own BIOS and are not affected by IDE limitations and can connect more drives than IDE. You also don't have to setup the drive inside the computer's BIOS setup program. Swapping a drive image file between IDE and SCSI may cause the image file to be unbootable (but not unreadable) because of different (assumed) geometry. So it's best to create and format a new drive image file and then copy the contents.
Also note that MS-DOS 6.22 has a partition limit of 2 GB, but does support multiple partitions on a larger drive. If you use MS-DOS 7.1 you may create larger partitions and format those with FAT32. However you do need to need to enable large drive support in fdisk, which may be tricky.
I'ts a good thing to backup al your files to an external drive, including vhd's.
Another thing you could try is using SCSI instead of IDE. SCSI adapters use their own BIOS and are not affected by IDE limitations and can connect more drives than IDE. You also don't have to setup the drive inside the computer's BIOS setup program. Swapping a drive image file between IDE and SCSI may cause the image file to be unbootable (but not unreadable) because of different (assumed) geometry. So it's best to create and format a new drive image file and then copy the contents.
Also note that MS-DOS 6.22 has a partition limit of 2 GB, but does support multiple partitions on a larger drive. If you use MS-DOS 7.1 you may create larger partitions and format those with FAT32. However you do need to need to enable large drive support in fdisk, which may be tricky.
I'ts a good thing to backup al your files to an external drive, including vhd's.